Description

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Icon Design Made Simple
Tutorial facts
Application: Adobe Illustrator
Tools: Most of the tools and palettes are in requisition, especially played around as much as Pen tool, Selection tool, Ellipse tool and palettes of Layer, Pathfinder, Transparency, and Blending mode and Gradient.
Level: Advanced
Finish time: About 45 minutes or more
What we need
So, here are two first things you need to know:
Are you ready? Here we go.
First, download the image below that shows the basic outline of the globe. Create a new document and drag the file into the artboard, and then lock this layer. Create a new layer and use it to draw the outline.
The sphere-shape portion includes three main paths of round shapes. The smallest round path inside will play the role of specular light, and the semi-circle path will be used for the reflected light. The continent portion has to show the two ground pieces, but it will be outlined in a clean and tidy way and has no detail about uneven surface, so that the icon will look simpler.
Fig 3
Fig 4
4. Use the Direct Selection tool to move the bottom anchor point and change the length of control handle until you get the result as shown below.
Fig 5
5. Draw another circle as shown in Fig 6 below to create the specular-light area.
Fig 6
6. Go back to the circle path created in Step 4 and make it bigger by using the Direct Selection tool to drag the path. The purpose is to prepare well for the following step of dividing paths. If you skip this step, you will get lots of tiny paths after the dividing step is done.
Fig 7
Fig 8
8. Ungroup the group just created by the Divide option and delete useless paths. You only need to maintain the reflection path and the circle path thatâ€™s similar to the one created in Step 4.
Fig 9
9. Put all the remaining paths into a group. Now you got the basic outline of the sphere shape.
You can create the continent outline like ours or choose a viewing angle of your own to make it different. You may also trace directly from some images from the internet, but you need to bring in its main figure only.
Scatter some islands to make the globe look more real and prominent. As working on this portion, we use the Pen tools to draw, and the Select Direction tool to edit. Note that the best way to master the Pen tools is picking up a very complicated image and trace it.
After the continent portion is done, put all of its paths into a group and hide this group.
3. Select all and set their stroke weight to none.
6. Fill the gradient you just created into the paths.
We will take the blue gradient created above to color the continent.
3. We wanted the continent have a thickness so that it would look more prominent. Select all the continent paths and use the Offset Path command to make duplicates.
Up to this step, we saw that the continent portion was not yet thick enough. So we decided to add a little more thickness to it by using effects.
3. Icon perfection
3. In the Transparency palette, change the Blending mode to Screen.
4. Oops, the color is not quite apposite. Try with a gray gradient and set its opacity to 37. OK, now it looks fine.
8. Switch to Pixel Preview to check the outcome before exporting.
4. Icon Sizes
Select the icon and scale it at 75% using the Scale tool. Click Copy.
We now have a globe icon designed with 4 different sizes. Besides, thereâ€™s no troublesome pixelation at all, so we donâ€™t have to worry about fixing anything more.
Here is another globe icon that looks quite different to the one above.
As a perfectionist, not only have we wanted our products to be as perfect as possible, we have also wanted to improve the quality of each and every article published on this blog. Any suggestions or contributions to this article are highly appreciated. We appreciate your time.
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MyBB says:
Very interesting, thanks for sharing.
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